Javier Montes: The Hotel Life

“Or Chutes and Ladders. As if board games weren’t miserable enough all by themselves.”

At length, he rolled the die onto the Parcheesi board. I stepped forward to see the result.

He peered at it, noticed me doing the same, and chuckled.

“But there’s still something about them, isn’t there? You can’t stand them, and you never feel like playing. Until you start. Six.”

He called the six at the same time as he pushed a token along, as one does in Parcheesi, even though I could see the number myself. He called it not gaily but with conviction, as if determined to go through every step of a ritual whose very pointlessness made it just and necessary.

“And then it’s impossible not to take it seriously. Soon you’re keeping score and moving pieces around and crossing bridges and going to jail, or back to Go. My roll again.”

He calmly collected the die and shook again. His gaze did not move from the board as he rolled.

“That’s your predicament, if I’m not mistaken. No, don’t tell me anything. Each of us has our own game here.”

And then he did look at me, beaming, with a flash of genuine triumph. At having wrong-footed me, I believe, as well as at the number on the die.

“Six again.”

He held out the shaker.

“Go on, you try. See how your luck is faring.”

I took it, to humor him, and gave it a shake. To humor him, yes — but also, let’s face it, with the mechanical excitement that the childhood sound of dice rattling in a little plastic cup never fails to arouse.

I rolled much harder than I meant to. The die somersaulted across the board, jumped to the ground, and disappeared under a sagging sofa.

My immediate instinct, I admit, was to crouch down to get it. I had a fleeting image of myself on hands and knees, arm shoved up to the shoulder in the black gap under the sofa. Our eyes met and he laughed first, as if he had read the intention on my face.

“Well, I guess we’ll never know.”

He spun his chair around and trundled toward the door at the other side of the room. I followed in silence, automatically; provided it led away from the elevator and the lobby where we had left old Pedro, any direction was fine by me at that point. More than fine, even: the only possible way.

“Just as well, I suppose.”

He spoke thoughtfully, without turning around in his chair, almost as though musing to himself. I didn’t understand what he meant and didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of asking. Nevertheless, he rotated slightly to show me his half smile.

“Another six from me and you’d have been packing for square one.”

I followed him through the warren that branched out on the other side of the Recreation Room, holding on to the back of the wheelchair. We were entering a duplicate hotel, deserted and secret, buried beneath the other. On either side of the hallway, there were rooms with bunk beds for the on-call staff and a small employee dining room with plastic tables and chairs. There were offices with sclerotic plants, bell panels with switches connected to each of the rooms upstairs, cork noticeboards with timetables and snapshots of long-gone parties. Inside a dressing room with decaying lockers, a solitary shirt hung from a hook. Multi-tiered carts, taller than me, were stowed against the walls. At times we had to squeeze past sideways. Some of them held used breakfast and lunch trays, soiled napkins, timbales and rusty cutlery that resembled the chattels of a king who had been buried with all his retinue and belongings.

The rooms were empty and the lights were on. But all the light bulbs in the world could not have banished that funereal atmosphere. The air smelled musty and stale. The relentless throbbing of the boiler room reverberated in my throat.

At last we reached the kitchens, installed in a vast space with chrome-covered floors and walls. The industrial cooking ranges were fitted into metal countertops. Close up, you could see that the surfaces were crisscrossed all over with knife marks, like the lines on the palm of a giant hand. The knives themselves, ordered by size and type, were suspended in their hundreds from the magnetic strip that ran all around the room at shoulder height.

These knives were also the only recognizable utensil, and indeed the only feature that identified the place as a kitchen — no other tools or appliances were visible. They were probably hidden behind the metal doors of the storage cupboards at the back, and were bound, one felt, to have unwieldy handles and impossible functions. This inimical kitchen, which looked more like an operating theatre or the control room of an alien ship, made the concept of ordinary, harmless pots and pans seem foolish and endearing.

My guide gave a sigh of satisfaction.

“Ah, very nice, very nice.”

He seemed to have forgotten all about me now as he wandered among the parallel rows of solid, metal pedestals that occupied the middle of the room. They rose as high as my chest, hiding him and his chair from view as he passed behind them. Lamps with huge bulbs hung down from the ceiling, so low they almost touched the tabletops. Underneath each one sat a small stack of white plates.

“This is where the contestants will be working.”

I think he deliberately misinterpreted my expression.

“The lamps help. That’s how the dishes are kept warm until they’re brought up to the dining room.”

He had disappeared among the rectangular podiums again. His voice reached me, but I couldn’t see him until he reemerged at the other end of the room and beckoned me toward one of the three big metal doors at the back. The round, glass portholes set into the center of each one accentuated the underwater feel of the whole place.

“Come over here, this is worth seeing.”

He gestured for me to open the door. I looked inside and immediately felt a gust of icy, deathly air on my face that made it difficult to breathe.

“The best refrigeration chambers in the country.”

His breath was a frozen mist, but for the first time, I observed a warm spark of enthusiasm in his eyes. We were in the secret storeroom of a tribe of giants — the shelves were packed with monumental milk cartons, mammoth bottles of oil, colossal jars of mayonnaise. There were crates holding tons of carrots and cabbages, and blocks of butter and chocolate enough to build an edible Tower of Babel. From great hooks attached to the ceiling rails dangled the red-and-white-streaked carcasses of entire pieces of livestock, like prehistoric hunting trophies.

I was getting goose bumps, and not just because of the cold. The memory of old Pedro on my trail began to seem confused, or secondary. Any second now, like in the fairy tale, the legitimate masters of all this would arrive to claim what was rightfully theirs and punish us for snooping.

The critic was engrossed in fingering some enormous pomegranates that had split open. I retreated to the door and spoke to him from there.

“I’m going back upstairs, if you don’t mind.”

He was lifting a scarlet pomegranate seed as big as a grape to his lips, and he didn’t raise his eyes. I don’t know if he only affected not to hear me or if he really was too far away to catch my mumbling.

I turned and walked briskly through the kitchens, toward the exit. I could hear the squeak of his wheelchair behind me, and I wanted to leave before he could say anything.

But I was cut off before reaching the door. With perfect punctuality, obeying my fears to the letter, old Pedro and his imperturbable smile stepped between me and the door. We breathed heavily for a moment without speaking, face to face.

He was the first to recover from the surprise. Actually, I think he still wasn’t in the least surprised.

I looked behind me and couldn’t see the critic anywhere. The refrigeration chamber was open and empty; the hanging lamps shone more implacably than ever on the metal surfaces. A last spasm of misplaced dignity or demented politeness stopped me from saying anything. I found myself stepping backwards, keeping the other man in sight.